


Love and War and All That Is Unfair

by Laguera25



Category: RED (Movies), The Bourne Supremacy (2004), The Chronicles of Riddick (2004)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-23
Updated: 2019-06-25
Packaged: 2020-01-25 13:27:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 15,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18575395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laguera25/pseuds/Laguera25
Summary: After Jason Bourne left him for dead in Berlin, Kirill Orlov is a burnt asset and has no choice but to start over.  Finding sanctuary with William Cooper, his twin brother who just happens to be in the CIA, he does just that.  Until the day William disappears and leaves behind nothing but an empty car and unanswered questions.  Kirill can't lose him again, and so he returns to the life he thought he'd left behind and goes on the hunt for his brother.  What he finds is the last thing he expected.





	1. The Hunt Goes Awry

**Author's Note:**

> While the words are my own, the background for William Cooper, his family, and Kirill come from the_random_writer, who is kindly allowing me to play on the fringes of her Separated Twins series, featuring William Cooper and Kirill Orlov as twins separated at birth. Additionally, she has had a hand in many of the scenarios that come to pass in this improbable meeting of three worlds.
> 
> All mistakes are mine.
> 
> Enjoy.

Love is patient.

Love is kind.

And in the end, love always wins.

 

Love, Kirill Orlov thinks as he surveils his targets through high-powered binoculars, is what gets you killed. It makes you stupid, vulnerable. It rots you from the inside with its intoxicating sweetness and leaves openings for people like him, soft spots into which he can sink lead-jacketed fingers and bring you to your knees, torn and bleeding and too weak to do anything but lie there while he puts two in your head and spreads your brains over the pavement. Love brings down the best of them long before he pulls the trigger, and as he watches the flicker of movement from the depths of the rotten, collapsing hovel in which his quarry has made its last, futile stand, he knows it's working its terrible, lethal magic on its inhabitants.

The flitting figure, little more than a wraith in the shadows, is too small to be a vaunted Necromonger commander. _The girl,_ he thinks as he lowers the binoculars and reaches for his rifle. _The one who's started the whole mess as far as the cold fucker who's paying him is concerned. The living, breathing proof that his word is not always obeyed._

The thought of the Lord Marshall makes his mouth pucker in a reflexive moue of distaste. Money cures many ills, and he would've been a fool to turn down such a lucrative contract, but the man, if that's what he is, sets his teeth on edge and makes his flesh crawl. His eyes are the dark, fathomless voids of a shark, and his voice is cold as a Siberian frost, and hollow, as though it issues from the depths of a well. No life in it, no warmth, the distant, implacable grate of a machine.

_Bring them to me. Alive,_ he'd ordered, face impassive beneath a ridiculous silver helmet that had reminded him of a cartoon he'd watched with his brother on a bleary television in the living room of the family flat in Berlin, though damn if he could remember the name as he'd knelt before the grimly ostentatious throne on which the Marshall had ensconced himself. No doubt in splendor he thought, though to Kirill, it had looked like nothing so much as a charnel house decorated in Eastern Orthodox baroque.

He'd racked his brain to make the connection even as his mouth had said, _Will it matter if they're whole? Your commander might not go gently, especially if he's got something to lose._

The faintest twitch of those thin lips. _Oh, he does. He does, indeed._ Spoken with the black relish of a predator with blood on his lips, and Kirill had fought the unfamiliar impulse to grimace and squirm. Most of the contracts he took were business, nothing more, but this was clearly personal, and personal had a nasty habit of getting messy. And messy was the last thing he needed.

But he had needed the money, more money than he'd ever seen, more than enough to see his mission through and find what he was looking for, and for that, he would do anything, would forsake every line in the sand that he had ever drawn and sell what remained of his soul without a second thought. So he'd stifled the need to recoil and focused on the job at hand.

The twitch of lip in the corner of the Lord Marshall's mouth had deepened into a smirk. _You may do whatever is necessary to fulfill your task. And whatever pleases you._ The smirk had become a humorless leer, disdainful and knowing, and Kirill's stomach had clenched and rolled beneath skin gone cold with revulsion. Of all his many sins, he had never stooped to _that._

_So long as they are alive and aware. I would have them know the price of disobedience._

The obsession of a lunatic, but Kirill had nodded and thought of the money and the chance it offered. _I understand._

_Good. Krone will see to what you need._

Kirill had inclined his head in acknowledgment and risen to his feet, and as he'd turned and stalked toward the exit, his mind already racing with scenarios and weapons lists, that hollow, grating voice had drifted after him, cold and clammy against his nape. _Remember, Breeder Orlov, the wages of sin is death._ His skin had prickled and crawled as though touched by the cool wriggle of a maggot, and only the promise of untold funds had kept him from washing his hands of the entire affair and disappearing into the vast reaches of space. 

It was the thought of the money that had kept him going, kept him in pursuit through the endless black gulf of galaxies and solar systems. It had pushed him to track them from planet to planet and system to system, a tireless relentless hound that would grant them neither rest nor quarter, and since it was not his purse he emptied in the chase, he had spared no expense in greasing palms and loosening tongues. 

Not that it had taken much; his quarry were surprisingly friendless as they fled for their pathetic, desperate lives, and he'd frequently been embarrassed at how cheaply shopkeepers and landlords had sold them. Necromongers were reviled, it was true, angels of death who descended on a planet like silver locusts and left it lifeless and burning in their wake, but he'd thought the girl might have inspired pity or at least a twinge of conscience, but those were in short supply, fading relics of a bygone era that most had jettisoned in the name of survival, and they had sealed her fate without so much as a twitch of the eyelid once cool silver had touched their upturned palm.

The money had driven him, and the money had brought him here to this sorry little planetoid little bigger than the clearing in which this inevitable endgame is unfolding, and once his targets are trussed and delivered to his most obliging of clients, the money will return him to his search.

_And that's what really brings you here, isn't it, boy?_ says Grandmother Orlova, rasping and querulous and contemptuous, her black eyes snapping with disapproval as her arthritis-swollen hands stroke the cover of her ancient Bible, heavy as a paving stone on her knees. _It's the search. You lost the only thing that ever mattered to you for the second time, had it torn from you in the blink of an eye. But you are no longer a child bound by the whims and ruthless strength of your pitiless father, ten years old and whisked away from everything you ever knew in the backseat of a station wagon. You are a man, hardened and honed by the streets and the masters you have served since you were sixteen and left to the bitter mercies of a world that does not care. You will find what it has stolen and tear it from its cold and fleshless grasp, and you don't care who you must destroy to do it._

_Even if it means killing a helpless child._

The thought opens a pit in his stomach from which snatches of memory rise like bile. The blear of Berlin through the rain-spattered window as the station wagon waddles over the slick asphalt of the Autobahn. The cool of the glass against his palm. The vast, conspicuous emptiness of the seat beside him and the utter, ringing silence as the flawless, well-oiled arteries of Germany give way to the choked and rutted roadways of Mother Russia. The grim grandeur of Isaakievskiy Sobor's gold-plated dome as it rises into the twilight. The dingy, yellowing shithole into which they move, cramped and gloomy and too quiet, and always filled with the stale stink of cheap cigarettes and wet wool. The dusty thump of his socked feet on the thinly-carpeted floor and the the uneven skim of his fingers over popcorned drywall that flakes and falls to the floor like psoriasis and the slowly-dawning realization that the silence that had never been before and should not be now was forever. The sensation of drowning, as though the air has gone thick and stifling as marsh mud, the cold slop of it around his ankles and sucking greedily at his chest and slipping inside his nostrils like leeches. The pain in his chest and belly that lasts for months, as though someone has thrust a hot scalpel into his chest and cleaved him in two. The stern, white-coated doctors who scratch their heads and peer at their test results and tell him he's fine. The taciturn father who scowls and squeezes his shoulder until it throbs and orders him to forget, as if it were that simple, as if he weren't blindly groping for half of himself with the peaty taste of mud in his mouth.

But these are dangerous thoughts. If he dwells on them for too long, hands steady as bedrock will tremble, and that cold scalpel will sink into his gut and leave the throbbing fire of a severed umbilicus in its wake, so he pushes them aside and reaches blindly for his trank rifle, gaze still fixed on his prey.

The rifle, a modified TRQ 203-C Longsword, settles him, and his breathing slows as he raises it. His vision sharpens even before he presses his eye to the scope. Sound recedes into insignificance, and there is only the weight of the rifle against his shoulder and the cradling press of the damp earth beneath him. Breath in, breath out, and his finger curls around the trigger. But not yet. Another breath, and he studies his target through the magnifying lens of the scope.

It's the girl, and she's far smaller than he'd expected. From the Lord Marshall's inflectionless ranting, he'd envisioned someone older, an apostate Necromonger woman, tall and statuesque and draped in silver like the buxom lovelies who surrounded his throne, but this is a stripling, little more than a child, by the looks of her. She's short and painfully skinny, and the shift she's wearing billows around her like a filthy shroud as she clambers through the hovel's tiny rear window.

_Ten at the most,_ he decides. _A fucking kid. Shit._

_And yet you will pull the trigger,_ Grandmother Orlova says. _Because there is nothing of God in you anymore, if there ever was. You are of the Devil, and you will do his bidding._ She shakes her head and spits between her gnarled fingers and strokes the cover of her Bible.

He thinks of the Lord Marshal as he watches her climb through the window. _You may do as you please,_ he had said, and leered. His stomach rolls. The child is a gangle, all hair and long, thin, arachnid limbs, and the possibility that she could inspire anything but pity nauseates him.

_Am I working for a child fucker?_ he wonders, and in his minds eye, he sees those silver-draped lovelies around the Lord Marshall's throne, beautiful as his darkest sins but dead-eyed as the crumbling statues of Pompei. _Is that what I've come to? And if he's a pervert, what does that make my other target, the one who ran with her in the first place?_

Dark surmises try to crowd his mind, sordid scenarios he would rather not entertain, thank you very much, and he removes his eye from the scope to clear his vision.

_Who gives a shit?_ he chides himself as he returns his eye to the scope. _What does it matter why he wants them? It's his fucking business. All you need to worry about is the money. Stop thinking and get the job done. If it makes you feel better, you can shoot Perv 1 in the dick before you drop them off._

A snort from Grandmother Orlova. _So you deliver her from one monster, only to deliver her to another. Only you would consider that a good deed._ Another shake of her head.

He pushes the old woman and her condemnation aside. She is so many bones beneath the Russian earth now, and the girl has emerged from the window, hunched and scuttling. She's still arachnid, but there's nothing of the furtive, skittering insect about her. Indeed, she's torpid and lumbering as she claws through the scraggly underbrush growing beneath the window. It's logy and uncoordinated, and he wonders if she's been drugged.

_Maybe that's how these pervs keep them docile,_ he muses as he exhales through his mouth and lines up his shot. _Get pumped with enough heroin or Halo, and you don't care who's sticking their dick where._ That pleasant, thought, too, is shunted aside, exhaled on a cleansing breath, and he rests his finger on the trigger, which thrums beneath his touch like an eager lover long ignored.

_If I had known she was going to be this easy to bag, I would've done it last night. I could've used her as a bargaining chip to convince His Lordship to come quietly. Probably would've saved us both a lot of trouble._ He gives an internal shrug. _Oh, well,_ Zhizn'prozhit-ne pole pereyti.

A flash of silver on the periphery of his scope, and he just has time to think, _Oh, shit,_ before he's hit by two hundred and forty pounds of Necromonger former First Commander with nothing to lose. His fingers squeezes the trigger in a spasmodic clench as an armored shoulder drives into his ribs, and the dart sails high and wide.

He rolls with the blow and uses the stock as a club. The blow clangs off his adversary's faceguard, but it's enough to snap his head back and send him off-balance, and Kirill seizes the opportunity to buck him off and deal him a kick to the chest. That, too, is rendered largely ineffectual by his intricately-scrolled and filigreed breastplate, but it creates the separation he needs, and he scrabbles for his stun gun. The soldier in him wishes it were his Sig Sauer, but orders are orders, and while the Lord Marshall might not quibble over a maimed trophy, he most certainly would object to his lost chance to make an example of this stubborn, wayward soul. Unhappy clients balk at the bill, and he's determined to collect every cent he's owed.

The Necromonger moves with surprising speed for a man wearing armor, and he lunges and swats the stun gun out of reach, but in so doing, he exposes his back, and Kirill mounts it with the fluidity and speed of a striking serpent and coils his body around his adversary, arms looped around his neck and feet hooked around his hips.

_Fuck, this bastard's strong,_ he thinks with dull amazement as his reluctant mount twists and bucks beneath him, shifting and relaxing his body with the skill of a trained fighter in a bid to slip from the choke. The gorget he's wearing won't let Kirill sink it in as deeply as he wishes, and he swears under his ragged, burning breath as his opponent rolls onto his back and pins him to the earth.

The sudden weight drives the air from him, but he maintains his dogged hold, at least until the back of the erstwhile First Commander's helmet meets his chin with the meaty, final thud of a cleat on leather. Stars explode in his field of vision, and blood fills his mouth, and for a paralyzed, panicked instant, he's back in Berlin, clutching the wheel of that Mercedes and watching the concrete pylon fill his vision, inevitable and final as God's judgment. Then the weight on his chest disappears. He draws a deep breath and rolls to the right just as a steel-booted foot slams into the dirt where his head had been. He blindly sweeps the foot with a flailing arm and shakes his ringing head to clear his vision.

_Fucker gave me a concussion,_ he thinks stupidly even as his body moves of its own accord and gets him onto his belly and then to his knees, booted feet churning in the scrubby grass. His fingers graze cool plastic. The stun gun. He picks it up, flicks off the safety, and pivots with a fluid twist of his torso. He fires without thinking, without looking, and as the prongs hiss through the air with a promissory sizzle, he sends up a prayer.

There's a stunned grunt, and when his vision clears, he sees the Necromonger. He's still on his feet, but he's unnaturally stiff, fingers twitching and teeth clicking behind his faceguard. He rises on his toes, and from his throat comes a staccato, copulatory grunt. _Unh. Unh. Unh._ The prongs have found purchase on his greave, and the same armor that had made him nigh-on unassailable is now a giant conductor. 

_Gotcha, motherfucker,_ he thinks with savage triumph, and keeps the button depressed as he crabwalks to his duffel for his restraint net.

And damned if he isn't still coming, or trying to. He takes a lurching, spastic step, eyes bulging and teeth gritted with the effort, and the former blaze with manic intensity as he wills himself onward. The copulatory grunts have lengthened and deepened and become the bellows of a wounded bull.

"Stay down, asshole!" he hisses as his bested quarry takes another jerky step, and then another. He increases the voltage as much as he dares, and his captive goes ramrod straight, head thrown back at a grotesque angle and fingers clenched into helpless fists.

_Keep that up, and you can kiss your money goodbye,_ the cold voice of calculation warns as he rummages through his duffel.

He yanks the restraint net from the belly of the bag and gets to his feet. His head swims for a moment, and then he spits bloody saliva and hurries forward to toss the net over his prize's shuddering head. When he's certain that escape is impossible, he steps back and kills the current. The Necromonger utters a guttural groan and manages a single, staggering, aimless step, and then he sinks to his knees and sways as if he's going to pitch forward onto his face.

Incredibly, he doesn't, he simply kneels, head bowed and chest heaving and limbs twitching with the aftereffects of the stun gun.

Kirill spits more bloody foam onto the dirt. "You put up a good fight. I can see why you were First Commander." 

The ragged rush of breath behind his faceguard, and then a hoarse, baritone voice takes him by surprise. "I earned my place," it says. "With rivers of blood."

Kirill nods amiably. "And then you tossed it away."

"Some things are worth more than glory."

"A piece of ass?"

No response, and Kirill figures his new friend has said all he's going to, but when he draws nearer to pull off his helmet and do him the honor of looking him in the eye as he delivers the decisive blow, he raises his head. Hazel eyes glitter from the depths of his helmet. "You are going to kill me?" It's not a question.

"No. The Lord Marshall wants you alive. You and your little piece in there fetch a prettier penny that way. It's nothing personal. Just business."

A bitter laugh. "I should have known." He sits back on his heels and fixes him with a penetrating gaze. No mania now, no determination, just fathlomless weariness and resignation. "Do as you wish with me. The gods know I have earned my death a thousand times. But let Nera go. I promised her a chance at life, and she deserves that much, even if I cannot be with her as I promised."

Kirill shakes his head. "You're in no position to negotiate, and promises to your underage whore are not my concern.

"Nera is my sister," he says quietly.

Oh. That changes nothing. It _can_ change nothing. His mission is too important, and nothing can interfere with it, but the revelation changes his perspective, and the righteous asperity drains from him. He's not running down a pervert who threatens to expose the entire dirty business of an intergalactic ring of kiddie fiddlers, but returning a pair of starving, dirty siblings who wanted a better life to their vengeful master.

_You're not the only one who fights for love, boy,_ Grandmother Orlova cackles, and he wishes he could kick her and her rocker into the very Hell to which she is so eager to consign him.

"I'm sorry," he says as though it makes any difference. Judging by the look on the other man's face, it doesn't. Not a jot. 

He is, too, for what little it's worth. He understands the call of blood, the implacable tug and pull of family, of love as intractable and pitiless as terminal illness. But because he understands is why he must. Family is what has brought him to this godforsaken rock, a call of blood stronger than any that binds these two. It has driven him from home and the tatter of the family he has left, and now it will drive him to knock this pleading brother into oblivion and drag his sister past his limp body and into the maw of his shuttle.

_I'm sorry,_ he thinks again, and reaches out to pull off the Necromonger helmet. Perhaps he'll keep it as proof of a job well done, or sell it to a discerning collector of history. Rare is the soul who crosses paths with a Necromonger and lives to tell, let alone a Necromonger Lord and First Commander.

The man at his feet offers no resistance. He's too spent, too wracked by the aftermath of sustained electrocution. His eyes are glassy, and dark with exhaustion and defeat, and his shoulders slump and sway beneath the mesh.

He raises the helmet, surprisingly heavy in his hands, and time stops. The color vanishes from his world in a shutter flash, and it's his turn to sway drunkenly. His ears begin to buzz, and his skin goes feverish and clammy, as though he's been stricken with an ague.

"Wh-" he says, but that sole, idiot symbol is all he can manage. His tongue has forgotten its lifelong art and lies inert and stupid on the floor of his mouth.

He reels drunkenly backward, and the helmet slips from his nerveless grasp and lands with a muted thud. It rolls in the dirt, forgotten and far away.

_It's William,_ he thinks wildly as the world yaws dangerously beneath his feet. It's him, but it can't be, because William is gone, a ghost in the mist. He disappeared and left nothing behind but a car with an open door and the keys still in the ignition and a family stumbling around the gaping hole he'd left in their midst. Mike, with her haunted eyes and downturned mouth and constant calls to the Agency and the Feds and any two-bit merc who would take her money. Alex, hangdog and quiet and taking refuge in video games he plays on autopilot, hollow-eyed and distant in the wan, flickering light of the TV. Tati, alternating between the stony silence of a Sphinx and the explosive, howling rage of a dervish, tears and snot glistening on her blotchy face as she demands a father no one can produce.

And him, blundering around in a darkness he'd thought he'd left behind forever and looking for an other half he'd but recently recovered.

"William?" he says, small and brittle and beseeching, and then he turns and vomits into the dirt, his stomach spasming again and again and again, until the endless retching sounds like a rising wail of grief.


	2. The Bitter Taste of Victory

_William._ The thought surges in his head with every heave of his spasming stomach. _William. William. William._ His jaws gape and stretch, and the bile splatters between his feet, and still the name thunders on the inside of his aching skull. _William. William._ Open. His mouth is endlessly open, and the strings and clots of a meal he hardly remembers spill from his mouth. _William._ The name rises in his throat and slides over his tongue, and he's sure he must choke on it, an adder strangling on its own insinuating tail.

_William. William. William,_ his mind insists with dull implacability, but it can't be, because the last time anyone saw William, he was dressed in the neat, predictable attire of a suburban family man and coming out of the grocery store with a grocery bag the techs who investigated the scene would determine held a gallon of milk, two percent, a Dove dark chocolate bar that had melted to sugary spackle in the summer heat, a box of Kotex ultra-thin, easy-glide tampons, and a cheap stuffed hedgehog he'd bought for reasons known only to himself. There had been no armor, no starveling waif, and there sure as shit hadn't been a glossy mohawk-mullet that made him look like a refugee from a a nightclub in 1985 Prague.

And yet his mind refuses to be dissuaded. _William. William. William,_ it cries, and his heart follows suit, manic and yearning, and why not? If William is here, ensnared in his net and shivering with the aftereffects of electrocution, then he hasn't vanished into the smothering, secretive ether of a black op from which he'll never emerge. He's not another unacknowledged casualty of an undeclared war without end, his brains and blood sluiced down the grimy drain of some anonymous killing room, his body fed to some belching incinerator dusted with the fine remnants of countless other burned assets. He's not a dossier in some secret file room with the word DEACTIVATED emblazoned across a personnel photo stripped of all life, all sense of who he was.

If he is here, sprawled in the scrub and watching him spew his guts, then he hasn't left him behind to grope at wistful shadows. Again.

_And if that's not William,_ his Spetsnaz commander interjects with sardonic dryness, _then he's probably worked himself free and is about to plunge his tactical knife into the base of your useless fucking spine._

The admonition momentarily penetrates the stupefying fog of his grief-stricken confusion, and he twists to peer behind him, hands on knees he can't feel and a stringer of spittle on his chin. But his quarry is as he left him, on his knees beneath the net and gazing him with glassy-eyed bemusement.

"No stomach for the kill?" he asks, his eyes on the string of saliva dangling from his chin.

_I've killed hundreds, you smug fuck,_ he thinks savagely as he swipes at the thick slick of bile and flicks into into the dirt. He spits to remove the last traces as best he can and straightens. His back is sore and sprung from the incessant heaving, and he can't feel his legs from the knees down, but he he spins without betraying his weakness and faces his adversary.

"Keep running your mouth, and I'll drag your sister out here and make her watch while I break every bone in your legs," he snarls, but it's an empty threat. To break him would be to break William, and the thought makes his restless stomach heave with the promise of renewed rebellion.

But what he doesn't know won't hurt him, and it has the intended effect, because his new friend subsides and sinks lower under the net, as though his reserves are failing him. Good. It will make things easier.

Kirill spits again in a futile bid to ride his mouth of its sour tang and crouches in front of his quarry, who, though beaten, meets his gaze with the cold hauteur of a cat. _Go fuck yourself,_ his expression says, and damned if he doesn't almost admire it. He shakes his head in grudging appreciation. _Strong-willed fucker, aren't you?_

"I already told you. I'm not going to kill you. Or your sister. I'm just dropping you off and getting paid."

A soft snort and the scrape of a greave as the former First Commander shifts in his snare. "Whether by your bullet or your deed, the end is the same."

"They're not paying me to care. You're going, one way or another. This doesn't have to be hard. You can come willingly, have a little food, a warm blanket, and a few nights without the fear of being hunted, or you can continue to pretend you have a chance, and I can beat the shit out of you until you either choke on your own blood or your screams bring your sister out here to beg for your life."

He's surprised--and not a little confused--when his matter-of-fact soliloquy is met with a low chuckle. "I doubt the latter very much," Vaako says drily, and in the back of his mind, Kirill hears William, nine years old and dripping fond fraternal scorn upon his dire threats of merciless retribution. _Whatever,_ bratishka.

_You fucker,_ he thinks furiously. _You stupid fucker. How dare you not be William._ Only his brother's eyes gazing at him from that hauntingly-familiar face prevent him from drawing his fist back and smashing it into that finely-sculpted cartilage and bone until it goes soft and formless and gelatinous beneath his pummeling hand and there's nothing to remind him of what he has lost.

"You want it the hard way, then?" he snarls.

"I deserve my fate. I have bought it with the blood of a thousand homeworlds, but leave Nera here. Her only fault was to share my blood. And that I could not kill her for her imperfection." His tone is mechanical and his face a bloodless mask, but his eyes are alive and beseeching.

He thinks of the scrawny child he'd seen through his scope, swallowed by her thin, grimy shift and struggling to climb from a window, fleshless hands scrabbling at tussocks of brown grass and dry earth. "Do you really think she would get far?" he asks. "This place is a shithole, and I doubt she's strong enough to fend for herself. If I leave her here, she'll be dead in a week."

Vaako is silent for a long time. "Days," he says finally. "She has days." His eyes fill with painful resolve. "But it will be better than what waits for her at the Lord Marshall's feet. What waits for both of us. If you have any mercy in you, assassin, you will kill us both and deliver only the useless shells."

He thinks of the Lord Marshall, cold and vulpine on his throne, fingers white as bleached bone curled loosely around the gaudy silver of his throne. His vulpine smile when he'd so magnanimously granted him the right to do as he pleased to his captives so long as they were delivered alive and lucid enough to suffer his wrath.

_They must know the price of disobedience._

He has no doubt that it _would_ be a mercy for him to put a bullet in the base of their skulls and one in their hearts for good measure. Where they're going, death will be a long time coming, and it will not take them unawares, with the hot, piercing crash of a bullet, but with the slow intimacy of peeling flesh and blood pooling between spread-eagled feet. And he knows with the naked certainty of hard experience that his client will make Vaako watch every excruciating minute of Nera's punishment before his ever begins.

_Maybe I can kill the girl,_ he thinks. _Even Vaako knows she's failing. It wouldn't take much to finish her. A few minutes with my hand over her nose and mouth or sitting on her chest, and it would be all over. I could bring the body back as proof of capture and tell the Lord Marshall that she was too weak to survive transport. She looks like death walking from what I could see. He might actually believe it. It's Vaako he wants, anyway._

_Look at what his become of you, Kirill,_ his grandmother cries, scandalized, and clutches her Bible in a white-knuckled grip. _As a boy, you brought home every flea-bitten stray in Berlin, and now you stand here and calculate the cleanest way to kill a child. Such a demon you have become!_

_It is all that I can do, babu,_ he wails, scalded by the loathing of a woman who had loved him so doggedly as a boy, when he'd been skinny and defiant and flailing at the world, face set and older than its years and stomach ever aching, and who had tried to steer him to a gentler path before death had snatched her from him, too. _If I let them go, the Lord Marshall will kill me where I stand, and there will be no one to look for William. If he's still alive, he'll rot in some forgotten hole until he dies. and if he's already dead, his bones will disappear in some jungle, covered by dirt and moss and tree roots and gnawed by fucking bears. I'm his only chance. I have no choice._

Her only response is stony silence, and he's surprised by the intensity of the hurt that washes over him. He runs his fingers through his close-cropped hair and fights the impulse to rub his uneasy belly.

_Who cares what she thinks? She's long dead, and you've got a job to do. Get it done,_ he orders himself gruffly, and rises from his crouch, intent on rounding up the other half of his catch.

He doesn't have to go far, as it turns out. She's twenty yards ahead, crouched in the brittle scrub grass, a runty rabbit kit huddled in the shadow of the lynx. She's as pale as her brother, moonbone white inside her grimy, grey shift, and the contrast of her pale toes against the sere, brown grass and dirt makes his eyes water. She stares at him with wide, sunken eyes and sways from side to side, as though even holding a crouch requires more strength than she possesses. There's no fear on her face, just exhausted wariness and a flicker of curiosity. She brushes the hair from her face with a sweep of bony fingers.

"Come here," he orders, and waves her forward.

She cocks her head and shifts with the crackle of dry grass, but makes no move to advance. Instead, her gaze flicks to her brother's back.

"She won't come to you. She doesn't understand." Vaako brushes his ear with his fingertips. "She's deaf. It is her...imperfection." His lips twist in a humorless smirk.

"Then I'll go to her." Kirill starts forward with a purposeful stride, but a netted hand curls around his ankle with surprising strength, a coil of tempered steel.

"Don't. You'll only frighten her, and I'm not sure she could withstand the strain."

"I thought you wanted it to be quick," he sneers before he can stop himself, and inside his head, his grandmother shakes her head and clicks her tongue in dark-eyed disapproval.

"I do not want her final moments filled with terror and pain." He releases his ankle and raises his hand over his head, and the girl's eyes track the movement, though she remains in her crouch. Vaako's fingers snap shut in a tight fist.

The runty rabbit moves with surprising speed, spindly legs flying as she closes the distance. She barrels into her brother, panting and snuffling and tugging feebly at the net.

"It's all right, little bird," Vaako soothes, and his hands trace patterns on the air. "Calm down. You'll only tire yourself." He strokes her hair with an armored hand, and she slumps against him with a mournful hoot that makes Kirill's chest cramp. No words, but Kirill understands it even so. _I'm tired, big brother._

He looks away. "Will you come, then?" he asks brusquely.

"I see no other choice. At least this way, Nera might get a few decent meals before..." Siberius lets the thought hang between them, unfinished, and Kirill knows that in his mind's eye, he's picturing what waits for them at the end of this unwanted voyage.

_You can't say it,_ Kirill thinks with melancholy, bitter solidarity. _Anymore than I can let myself think about what might be happening to William in some forgotten hole at the edge of the world. To speak it is to breathe life into it, and that's not a risk a brother's heart can take._

"I'm glad you've chosen to see sense," he says, and self-loathing washes over him in a noxious, cloying tide, warm silt and bilge water. "If I remove the net, do I have your word that you will not resist?"

"Yes." The reply is little more than a whisper, and when Kirill musters the discipline to look at the fruits of his squalid triumph, he sees that Siberius has tucked the sad bundle of rag and bone that is his baby sister against his body as best he can through the netting and is rocking her back and forth. She slumps against him, breath thin and ragged and eyelids fluttering.

_Demon boy,_ his grandmother spits, and he wishes he had the courage to pick up his tranquilizer gun and smash the butt into the girl's fragile temple, drive skull fragments into her brain in a spray of lethal shrapnel that snuffs out all awareness in an instant, but to do that would be to let William slip through his fingers again, this time forever. He would have to go back to Michelle and the children Viko loved so much and tell them that he had failed to bring their father home, and then he would have to learn to live with the yawning void that made his stomach ache and his head throb with no hope of relief.

And so instead he stoops and lifts the night high enough for his prisoner to slip from beneath. The ever-vigilant corner of his mind braces for a sudden attack, a sudden flurry of purposeful movement, but with Nera on the net, there's just room for Vaako to crawl from beneath. He rises to his feet with a grimace and sweeps the grass and dirt from his armored knees, and then he turns and scoops up his sister, who lolls against him, her head on his shoulder, eyelids rising and falling in a slow, vacant blink.

"Start for my shuttle," Kirill says. "If you try to run, I'll fry you until you shit, and your little rabbit there will get a jolt, too."

"Rabbit?" Bemused.

"Just fucking move."

Vaako hitches his sister more snugly in his arms and plods toward the small runner that the Lord Marshall had deigned to give him. Fine enough for one grubby merc on the hunt, Kirill supposes, but it's going to be a snug fit with the three of them.

_I don't think he gave much of a shit for comfort,_ William observes wryly inside his head, and God, his yearning for his brother is a physical ache. _Crazies who worship death generally don't._

"There are a few things in the hut," Vaako says indistinctly.

"I don't give a shit," comes the brusque reply, but he makes a mental note to check it out once he's gotten them secured. He needs to gather his weapons anyway, and there might be a few things worth scavenging. He might check out their shuttle while he's at it. It's twice the size of his no-frills piece of shit, and maybe Vaako stole more than the bare necessities for his little freedom ride--gold, silver, jewels, anything that could be sold on the fly to feed a starving little girl or buy medicines to keep her from dropping where she stands.

Which is a possibility that's growing closer to certain with every step, by the looks of her. She's still conscious, but barely, and with every breath, she utters a soft, miserable hoot, a dying whipporwill.

"I know," Vaako soothes, and pats her bony back as though he were burping a colicky infant. "We're almost there, and then you can have something warm and filling for your tummy, hmm?"

_Why are you talking if she can't fucking hear you?_ Kirill wonders peevishly, but decides it doesn't matter as long as it keeps them moving. He glowers at Nera, who offers him a wan smile, and the guileless innocence of it makes his stomach roll. _Like fattening a lamb for the slaughter,_ he thinks, and vows that when he finds the bastards who've taken William, he'll make them pay for turning him into such a goddamn monster.

He shoves past Vaako, teeth clenched behind his lips, and stomps up the landing ramp of his shuttle. The door opens noiselessly, and he ducks inside and stands to the left to let Vaako pass, but the latter merely stands in the threshold and scans the shadowy interior in dubious appraisal.

"Is not hotel," Kirill snarls, self-loathing and impatience dispensing with the frivolity of proper English.

"Clearly," Vaako agrees, unruffled by his pique, but he steps inside, and the door closes behind him. 

There's an unpleasant, jaundiced knowing in the man's face that makes Kirill's skin go clammy even as he's seized by a feverish rush. "What?" he demands.

"Did you pick this shuttle, or did he?" Vaako asks, as though he hadn't heard.

"None of your fucking business."

Vaako's lips curl in a humorless grin, lupine and cold.

Kirill thinks of the Lord Marshall, perched on his throne like a glutted vulture. Perhaps it's not so surprising that this man was his favored second, after all. "What?" he demands again.

"Where shall I put her?" is Vaako's only reply. If the provenance of the shuttle is none of his concern, then he clearly sees no need to share his little secret. Suit himself. In a few days, his amusing little secrets will be so many drying red stains at the Lord Marshall's triumphant feet.

"There." Kirill jabs a finger at a narrow metal slab that juts from the starboard wall.

Vaako eyes it without enthusiasm, and the brother in Kirill can't blame him. It's an unprepossessing shelf of cold, grey metal bereft of even the thinnest of cushions or blankets, uncomfortable even for people with adequate body mass and meat on their bones, but a likely bed of torment for a fleshless child whose hips and collarbones scrabble restively at her skin in search of escape.

_Getting the fun started early,_ he thinks bleakly. "Wait," he growls, and slips past him to stalk aft to his own spartan berth. 

He yanks the thin, olive Army-surplus blanket from the sagging, finger's-width of mattress he had for himself and returns to the main cabin. Vaako hasn't moved, and the grim survivalist in him wonders why he hasn't tried to put up more of a fight, hasn't tried to catch him in a choke from behind and snap his neck with an efficient, brutal twist or to turn and make a run for his own shuttle. The girl, he suspects, who, precious though she may be to him, is pure liability in a fight, an encumbrance of which he must always be aware and by which he might be fatally distracted. Or maybe he just knows it would be no use, that even if he could make it out the door and down the ramp, there is nowhere to go. There is only this tiny, barren scrap of rock in space and another race he'll never win.

He steps around the inert Vaako and spreads the blanket over the slab. It's not much of an improvement, and it's a sentiment that Vaako must share, because he makes no move to lay his sister down.

"Is not hotel," Kirill repeats obdurately. "It's what there is. Take it or leave it."

Vaako sighs and settles her on the blanket. "I know," he commiserates when she lets out a squawk of surprising vehemence, and his hands weave and flutter on the air. "My apologies, little bird, but it's the best I can do."

Her own hands rise, spidery and white as the bones beneath. Vaako watches intently. A huff of amusement.

"I know," he says, and fingers pluck at unseen strings. "But there is no rock under your butt."

Kirill snorts and leaves them to the weave and weft of their conversation. The girl has more pluck than he expected, but it's clear from her cracked and flaking lips that she needs fluid and electrolytes if she's going to make it beyond the next few hours. He turns and rummages in one of the cramped overhead bins for a saline bag and an I.V. kit of line and needles. He wishes he had a ped-gauge needle for Nera's spindly arm, but the thought that she might be a child had never crossed his mind when he'd gathered his supplies, and beggars can't be choosers.

"Move," he grunts, and tries to shoulder Vaako aside. It's like nudging granite, and the former Necromonger merely blinks at him.

"What are you doing?" Polite, as though he's exchanging pleasantries with the local eccentric, but Kirill can hear the threaded steel beneath, the promise of resistance swift and brutal if this should be a threat.

"She needs fluid. She's badly dehydrated." He slaps the bag onto the edge of the bed and uncoils the med line.

"She won't like it."

"I don't care."

Vaako nods in grudging acquiescence and climbs behind his sister, who, no fool, apparently, eyes the unfolding drama with trepidation. He hums softly and tugs her scrawny form against him. "I know you're not going to like this," he murmurs, his hands threading words and indecipherable sigils in the air in front of her wide, wary eyes. "And that I have caused you far too much pain already, and I am sorry. But it will only be a moment, little bird, and then you'll feel better."

Nera clearly knows bullshit when she hears it, because she shakes her head and yowls low in her throat, and only the confining scissor of her brother's legs around her suddenly-bucking hips keeps her in place. Her nostrils flare, and tears ooze from her rolling eyes.

"Bup, bup bup," Kirill soothes as he swabs her terrifyingly-thin arm. "Quick, so quick," he promises. This might be necessary, but he sees no reason to be cruel. To be a monster.

_At least until you turn her over to the man who will kill her slowly,_ Grandmother Orlova notes sourly. _Then, the monster will feast._

He pushes the black prediction aside. "Perhaps if you turn her face so she cannot see," he murmurs to his reluctant co-conspirator without looking at him.

Vaako cups a gaunt cheek and coaxes it to turn with gentle, inexorable pressure. No patterns of wordless explanation on the air now, not when one hand fights to obscure her view and the other pins her wrist to the bed with implacable tenderness.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Vaako croons, his voice brittle.

"Almost," Kirill says in urgent accompaniment. "Almost." The needle sinks into exposed flesh like the predatory fang of the asp, and the howl of fear and panicked anguish it elicits sinks into his guts like a blade serrated and rusted with the blood of a thousand older sins. Nera bucks and twists, teeth bared, a rabbit ensnared.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Kirill says unthinkingly as he reaches for the tape with which to hold the line in place.

"There," Vaako says softly when he's finished and his hands are no longer accomplices to this sordid affair. "All finished. It's all done. No more."

Nera, unimpressed, sniffles dolefully at him and lets out a miserable, watery harrumph.

"I know," Vaako agrees, exhausted and defeated. "I know, my little bird."

"Tell her I'm sorry," Kirill says. He picks up the I.V. bag and hunts for a place to hang it. This shoebox of a shuttle wasn't made for a medical emergency, and it occurs to him as he hastily devises a plan to tape it to the wall above her head that if his currently-docile prisoner changes his mind about meek cooperation, the odds are good they'll both die out here before they make it back to Helion Prime.

Vaako duly relays his message. "He says he's sorry."

Nera eyes the incoming message telegraphed by her brother's busy fingers, and when it's finished, she favors it with an eloquent raspberry.

"Shall I translate, or do you get the gist?" Vaako asks drily.

Kirill snorts. "She needs to eat. Does she like chicken or beef?"

"Fish would be preferable, but chicken will do."

A brief survey of another small overhead bin reveals a dozen freeze-dried pouches of MREs, none of them palatable to even his cast-iron stomach, a few packets of instant oatmeal, and three cans of chicken soup. Hardly a bonanza. He scowls at the meager offerings as though to intimidate them into immediate improvement, and when they remain stolid and unchanged in the face of his ferocity, he snatches two cans of soup and slams the bin shut.

_Going to need a supply run,_ he thinks as he plods to the minuscule microwave and hotplate that serve as the kitchen with his fare.

_Why bother if you're just going to let them die later?_ his grandmother asks.

_I need to eat, too,_ he reminds her as he works, rattling around the tiny space in search of a bowl.

_Better you should have died long ago than become what you are,_ she retorts.

He cannot disagree with her, and so he does not try. He simply moves with crisp, military efficiency, pouring and stirring. A voice drifts aft, low and stentorian and indistinct. Vaako, still talking to Nera. He he listens as best he can as the microwave hums.

"-right now, my little bird. You've done so well and been so very strong and brave for me, but you can rest now. Such a fierce little warrior you have been. Mamat and Papat would have been so proud, but the fight is done now, and we'll be with them soon, all together again. You can run and play, and if the scrolls were right, maybe you'll even get to hear the birds sing."

He turns his focus from the conversation with a physical lurch, and his stomach burns and tightens. That was not for him to hear, and he will not further stain himself by eavesdropping on the last rites of the dead. 

He's so lulled by the mindless sound and motion of the heating soup that he starts and blinks when the microwave beeps to announce the completion of its task, and he shakes his head and wonders what the hell is wrong with him. He's been off his game since he pulled off that helmet and saw William looking back at him, and if he doesn't get his shit together, it's going to get him killed. He retrieves the soup from the microwave, and stumps back to the main cabin.

He's half-convinced they'll be gone, that while he's been drooling in front of the microwave, held in thrall to a bowl of soup, his cunning adversary has gathered his wits, his reserves, and his most precious of cargoes and made his escape. The makeshift sickbed will be empty, and their shuttle will be nothing but a vapor trail in the upper atmosphere. But they're right where he left them, crabbed uncomfortably on the metal slab, Nera slumped inelegantly within the protective cocoon of her brother's body. Vaako's head droops and his shoulders slump inside his armor, and Kirill suspects it's only muscle memory and grim intransigence that's keeping him upright.

_And at his post._

"Chicken soup." He thrusts the bowl at him.

Vaako's head snaps up, eyes wide and darting inside his wary face, and in the sullen wash of illumination cast by the interior running lights, exhaustion spreads like a bruise from beneath his eyes to his hollow cheeks.

_The fight is done now, and we'll be with them soon,_ Kirill thinks. _He knows. There will be no more running._

"Soup," he repeats, and gives the bowl another impatient jab, a fencer pricking his fumbling opponent with the point of his epee.

A slow blink of gritty-eyed incomprehension, and then his expression clears. "Oh. Yes. Gratitude." He inclines his head and accepts the proffered bowl. Then, "Do you have a spoon? I doubt she has the strength to hold it herself."

Probably not, he agrees, but its liquid gold has galvanized her. Her nostrils flare at the heady aroma of irradiated chicken broth, and her lips smack with Pavlovian, reflexive want.

"Wait," Vaako cautions, and lays a restraining arm across her shoulders.

_You might as well be shouting into the whirlwind, my friend,_ he thinks as Nera utters an animal whine and wriggles impatiently between his pincering legs. He casts about for the nearest plastic spoon.

_Probably should have put the soup in a cup instead._

Nera, who gives not a fig for the social niceties, bays for the broth, no meek rabbit now, but a lynx kitten with the scent of the vole in her nostrils. She strains against Vaako's arm with surprising vigor, teeth bared and hazel eyes fixed on the bowl her brother holds just out of reach, miraculously steady despite her thrashing.

"Fuck," Kirill snarls, and double-times it to his aft berth and the small, drab duffel beneath. He yanks it from its resting place and tosses it onto the bunk. The zipper mutters irascibly at him as he opens it, and it purses its lips at him in a prim moue of disapproval as he retrieves his mess kit with its small spoon and fork, Grandmother Orlova, come to roost in one of the fundamental tools of the life she had so loathed and dreaded for him.

He tosses it--and her baleful scowl--to the floor and kicks it beneath his bunk, and then he hurries back to the cabin, where Nera is keening in a register that hurts his ears and scrabbling furiously for the soup, face wet with tears she can ill-afford to shed. Vaako holds the bowl aloft like some sadistic waiter, and the miserable exhaustion on his face inspires a pang of sympathy.

"Spoon," Kirill announces as though it will make any difference, and jabs it at the tangle of contesting limbs.

It's Nera who grabs it. Strangely, it seems to soothe her, and she slowly subsides, her thumb worrying the stubby handle.

"Yes. Good. See? You will get food," Kirill says, and God, why has he becoming a gabbling idiot?

With Nera preoccupied with her newly-acquired tableware, Vaako cautiously lowers the bowl and holds it in front of her. "There we are now. Eat up, little bird."

As if she needs any encouragement. She plunges the spoon into the broth with a needy, animal whine and stretches her neck to shorten the distance between it and her mouth, and it's a wonder she doesn't inhale his spoon in her effort to swallow as much as possible.

_Why do you persist in talking to her when she can't hear you?_ But to ask is to care, and that is a weakness he cannot allow, and so he banishes the thought and says, "I'm going out," instead. "If you try to leave, I'll pursue you as long as it takes."

Vaako blinks at him, slow and weary and unimpressed. "Do you think me without honor?"

The question flummoxes him, and so he does not answer. "The head is aft." He jabs a vague finger to the rear of the shuttle. Not waiting--or caring--for a reply, he ducks out of the shuttle and clatters down the ramp.

Dusk is closing in, and the thin atmosphere of the planetoid is a dusky, pink haze above him. Twenty minutes of usable light, maybe thirty, and then he's shit out of luck. The scrubby landscape doesn't look dense enough to harbor dangerous predators, but a xenobiologist he isn't, and there's no guarantee that this rock isn't infested with some nocturnal, burrow-dwelling insect endowed with lethal venom and an affinity for warm-blooded organisms. The thought makes his calves itch and burn, and he moves as quickly as he dares.

The wan and fading sunlight winks off his taser and Vaako's helmet and the metal wires threaded through the mesh of his weighted net. It's a perversely beautiful sight in the gathering gloam, and a wistful, childhood voice whispers that he would sketch it if only there were time, melancholy and cracking beneath the uneasy, demanding weight of adolescence, but it is weak and too accustomed to being ignored, and so it does not protest when it is ruthlessly stifled by the unsentimental demands of the mission.

It's a matter of moments to demolish the arresting tableau. He repacks his kit with the facility of long practice, gathering and rolling his net in under ninety seconds and disassembling and storing his trank gun in its case in forty-five. He performs a quick sweep of the trampled grass in the skirmish zone for anything he might've dropped in the fight, but there's nothing but trampled, flattened grass and shallow bootprints in the thin layer of soil.

Soon, all that remains is Vaako's helmet, desolate and forlorn in the darkening expanse of the small clearing. In a few minutes, it will be all but invisible in the smothering darkness that's descending with blind, witless inexorability, nothing but a shadowy rock over which inattentive feet might tangle and trip.

_Leave it. It will only take up space and weigh you down, and anyway, it's bad luck. It's the lid of the Pandora's box you opened to find your brother's face. No good can come of it. Let it lie where it is until it's reclaimed by the grass or this fleck of rock is reduced to cosmic dust by a passing asteroid._

Very sensible, and advice he would follow without a thought any other time, and yet he finds himself scooping it up. It's heavy for its size, and though its design is stark and utilitarian and early-Soviet, all artless lines and failing iron mill-grey, it's also inexplicably captivating, as though its history has granted it a power beyond its pedestrian creation.

He stuffs it into his duffel and zips the latter. If nothing else, he can sell it for a few credits to some armchair warrior who beats off to the thought of glorious victories on a battlefield his flat, hairy-toed feet have never touched, and it's always possible the Lord Marshall will want it back as much as he wants the man who wore it.

He pauses long enough to drop the duffel at the end of the ramp. The rifle case he keeps. Vaako might be well and truly subdued and too exhausted to put up further resistance, but Kirill's willing to bet he hasn't survived this long and risen so highly in the Necro ranks by being a passive, wilting idiot who waits to die, and he has no doubt that he knows how to use a rifle with deadly efficiency. No sense in tempting him to renewed courage.

Besides, it could come in handy if it turns out that venomous nocturnal bugs aren't the biggest threat on this rock, after all.

He makes a beeline for the shuttle. It's his now, too, he supposes, another spoil of his successful hunt, and if it's in good condition, he could get a good price for it. Provided the Lord Marshall doesn't want it back, of course.

_Who says he has to know? As far as he knows, you caught them because they crashed on this dirtheap, and there was nothing left of it but scrap. Tragic but unavoidable. You can offload it on your next supply run, use some of the credits to resupply, and use the rest to find William._

He runs through a list of possible buyers as he picks his way through the thin line of scraggly bush behind which Vaako had done his best to conceal it. It's a piss-poor job, but probably the best he could manage with what little he had to work with. There are no trees to provide dense cover, and the scrub grass barely covers the undercarriage. Even the bushes are puny and stunted, brittle from lack of water and adequate soil. Short of blowing the damn thing, there was nothing else he could've done, and that would've closed the door to any hope of further flight. Maybe the Necromonger in Vaako could've made that choice, but the big brother in him couldn't, and so here it sat, a pearl to be picked from the mud of the sty.

A quick circuit of the perimeter brightens his mood. It's easily twice the size of his shuttle maybe three times, and what's more, it's equipped with a fully-functional weapons system that includes dual-mounted forward plasma guns and a full complement of EMP grenades. He lets out a low whistle of admiration.

_If he'd turned these on me, I'd've been blasted out of the sky. The shitheap the Lord Marshall gave me doesn't even have weapons._

The question of why he didn't rises in his mind, but he turns it aside. What might have been is the stuff of fairy tales and old men stewing in their own shit and their old regrets in some nursing home that smells of rot and stalking death, and there is neither time nor place for either. Ten minutes. The lengthening shadows lap at his booted feet like rising tide.

A quick check of the outside maintenance hatch confirms his estimation of the commander's survival skills, if not his mechanical prowess. The ID transponder has been removed like an irksome tooth, and the severed wires dangle in the empty socket. He'd wager that the absent transponder had been reduced to so many useless fragments beneath Vaako's bootheel or jettisoned into space shortly after launch in a bid to throw the baying hounds off the scent and buy them time. If he weren't desperate for the credits, he'd applaud the man's obvious planning and balls-out determination, but as it is, he can only thank him for making it easier to sell this puppy to the neediest merc willing to pay. He closes the maintenance hatch and tramps to the boarding ramp that protrudes from the side like an outthrust tongue.

_A security lapse to leave it open,_ he notes.

_You left your door open,_ the censorious voice of his Spetsnaz CO points out. _Maybe they figured there are no locked doors in a tomb._

_Or maybe they got out in a hurry._

It occurs to him as he ascends the ramp that he might be walking into a trap. Maybe the door is open and the ramp down because his adversary counted on him being a greedy fuck as well as a soulless, murderous one. Maybe he was counting on him scurrying inside to gloat over his windfall, an eager rat darting into the trap to glut itself on poisoned cheese. Maybe the second his body breaks the plane of some unseen tripwire, it'll trigger a self-destruct protocol and he'll be reduced to a bit of bone fragment and so much bloody mist. Maybe his bedraggled prisoners, hunched on that metal slab, are listening for the concussive roar of his disintegration, and when it sounds and rolls across the clearing, they'll chortle in merry exultation and fly away to the next likely star.

He considers turning tail and returning to the dubious comfort but certain safety of his floating crate, but visions of his cup running over with credits and the persistent tug of nosiness impel him onward and upward, and he comforts himself with the pettish thought that if that was their grand plan, it's liable to blue up in their faces. A blast that big would likely damage their ill-gotten craft, too, and even if it were still flyable, the cupboard is bare. As weak as they are, they'd starve before they made the next trading post or outpost. If he's going, they're going with him.

He pauses at the top of the ramp, chest tight and ears straining for the quiet, impersonal _snick_ of instantaneous dissolution, but there is only the metallic, rattling tamp of heavy rubber soles on the floor. The shuttle is powered down and thus dark as a monk's asshole, but his initial assessment of its size is correct. It's huge, spacious, even, and as he scans from fore to aft, he can make out three separate compartments, as well as multiple overhead bins and several chairs that sprout from the floor like mangrove and cyprus stumps. 

_Bolted. Or welded. At least I fucking hope so._

A lump in the middle of floor in the larger aft compartment catches his eye, and he shuffles forward in the ever-deepening darkness, the scrape of his inching, soles the furtive, anxious rasp of sandpaper on stone.

_Probably a bomb,_ he thinks morosely, but even as he thinks it, he knows it isn't. It's too irregular, misshapen. _Soft,_ his mind whispers, like putty or carefully-mounded clay. Clothes, maybe, or discarded bedclothes, but that's not right, either. It's soft, yes, but it's too disparate to be linens, too deliberate.

The answer comes as soon as his fingers close around the most convenient lump, and his mouth goes sour and too-dry.

_Demon boy,_ his grandmother clucks as he stares at the indistinct outline of a teddy bear.

_Monster,_ he thinks as blood pounds in his temple and the uneven faultline of his old skull fracture throbs. _I am a fucking monster._

He wants to hurl the teddy bear away from him, but his fingers refuse to relinquish their hold. He can only stare at it, sense the scrutiny of eyes he cannot see, befuddled and hopeful. _Hello! Are you a new friend?_

To throw it seems a blasphemy beyond pardon, and so he swears under his breath and beats and inglorious retreat, plump teddy legs brushing his outer thigh as he scissors to the fore on legs gone curiously ungainly, as though they have forgotten their appointed tasks. The teddy's head lolls as though a savage blow has severed its spine, and he avoids looking at it as he clatters down the ramp and into night air rapidly going from cool to cold. In an hour, it will be frigid.

Two minutes, he tells himself as he blinks at the brilliant stars and sucks in a lungful of crisp air. He makes one more effort to toss his unwanted passenger aside, but it has declared them friends, never to be parted, and clings to him as he trots back to the beckoning, slack maw of his shuttle.

The metal slab is empty this time, but a voice drifts from the head, interrupted now and then by the soft, slurred hoot of a sedated owl. "Prisoner, announce yourself," he barks, and promptly feels like an idiot. There is no gimlet-eyed commander peering over his shoulder to see that he follows protocol, vodka-soaked breath a warm, humid puff against the side of his face.

"We are here," comes the reply, a sedate rumble. The sedated owl hoots in drowsy agreement.

He's not sure how they've both managed to wedge themselves into the miserly head, which consists of a low-slung steel toilet, matching sink, and sonic, hand-held shower, but there they are. Vaako is doing his best to become one with the starboard wall, back pressed flat and armored toes en pointe, while Nera sidles and shuffles in front of the toilet, I.V. bag clutched in her bony hands like an unfinished doll.

Vaako plucks it from her hands. "You're supposed to hold it above you, little bird," he murmurs.

"Why do you talk to her if she can't hear you?" Kirill finally asks waspishly. "It seems a waste of breath."

Vaako shrugs. "Perhaps it is. Habit, I suppose. I was her translator whenever we were in mixed company, which was often."

Nera lifts the hem of her shift, and Kirill catches a glimpse of knobby knees and stringy thighs before he turns his head. He has no desire to see the toll life has taken on a child who, in a sane and just world where twin brothers weren't snatched from the streets by faceless men who leave not so much as a hair or fiber, would be playing with dolls, plump and rosy-cheeked and blissfully unaware of the arbitrary cruelty of the world.

"Is your shuttle functional?" he asks the port wall. The teddy bear is a leaden weight in his hand.

"It is." Kirill can hear the curiosity beneath the bone-deep weariness.

"Then why did you stop here?"

Vaako is quiet for so long that Kirill isn't sure he heard him, and he's about to repeat the question when he says, "I knew you would not stop, and I did not want her to die in the middle of the great nothingness. I wanted her to know the sun on her face, feel the earth beneath her feet, smell grass and trees and maybe the lingering kiss of a passing shower. I could do that for her, at least, if I could not give her all that I promised when I was too young to know better." The scrape of metal on metal as he shifts from foot to foot.

_She's not the only one who wanted those things, was she?_ he thinks. Self-loathing burns in his veins like incipient disease.

_Now neither one of them will see it. They will die, screaming, in the eternal dark. Such a stain you have left upon the world._ His grandmother shakes her head.

The gaping void behind his navel stretches and wails and squeezes like a punishing fist. "We will take it."

An airy, echoing fart greets this proclamation, followed by a more genteel, "As you say."

He blindly holds out the teddy bear. "I found this," he says gruffly.

A shrill, gleeful warble erupts, from a mouth, he fervently hopes, and he turns his head to see Nera, shift puddled around her emaciated hips, performing a giddy, drunken jig on the toilet, eyes fixed on the bear. She reaches for it with a beseeching hoot, but her brother is taller and faster, and he intercepts the delivery and tucks the bear beneath his arm in order to free up his hands.

"Yes, it's Sibearius. You can have him when you finish it here."

"Sibearius?" Kirill repeats.

"I didn't name him."

Nera looses a squawk of protest and lunges for the bear, but it's a doomed effort.

"As soon as you're finished. I promise. We're going back to the ship."

Nera brightens, and her hands flutter and snap excitedly.

"Yes," Vaako says softly. "Ship-home," and Kirill's stomach drops and roils.

_For William. I have to do this for William. I am his only chance. What are two more lives after all the ones I've taken for lesser reasons? For a bag of money and a week in Prague with some overpriced hooker?_

_Ship-home._ The innocent glee of a child going to her safe place of sugar plums and sweetest dreams, unaware of what awaits her at journey's end.

_I have to. For William._

He leaves them to finish their business and their squabble over Sibearius and busies himself with packing the essentials. There's so little left to take that a canvas drawstring bag more than suffices to carry the meager load, and he moves from bin to bin, pawing through the contents and dropping the occasional item into its slack gullet. The medkit goes in whole, though its contents are dwindling as quickly as the food stores. Medical tubing and med tape and three saline bags, a half-dozen syringes, needle and surgical-grade thread, some Steri-Strips and a tube of Superglue, not to be mistaken for the nearly-empty tube of Neosporin that lies on the floor of the bin like a wad of chewed gum. A few rolls of gauze, some small scissors, a pair of small forceps, handy for removing bullets and other unwanted foreign bodies, and a sad array of medication in prescription bottles--penicillin and cipro and Zithromax, Vicodin and Percocet and every wounded man's friends, Dilaudid and Oxycodone. 

The latter are the lone survivors of his brush with a concrete divider in a Berlin tunnel and his subsequent all-expenses-paid stay at a lovely CIA resort in Buttfuck, Virginia, where he'd spent more nights than he cared to remember huddled in that shitty hospital bed with snot in his nose and tears in his eyes, trying not to sob from the leaden, crushing throb in his mending skull and the white-hot flares of agony from his splintered leg that crested with every heartbeat. His fingers prickle and burn with the memory of clutching the cheap sheets so tightly that even his blunt nails tore the fabric. Those little pills had borne him away from the worst of the pain and saved his sanity, and though he hasn't needed them in so long that they're probably expired, he can't bear to throw them out, and so he tosses them in with the rest.

He's sweeping the pitiful remnants of their food supply into the bag when his human booty emerges from the head. Nera has reclaimed her furry companion, and buttressed by her sunken chest, it no longer looks like the collateral damage from a targeted IED. In fact, it's downright jaunty, and it beams at him with glass-eyed chumminess. _Oh, hello, there, friend. I've missed you._

Nera shifts the bear into the crook of her arm as though it were a milk-fat infant, and her fingers begin their strange ballet.

"I'm sorry for the butt flower," Vaako translates dutifully.

"Butt flower?" Surely, he's misunderstood. Either that, or Vaako is showing the first worrisome signs of a head injury.

"It's her word for a fart." Pained. "Since she can't hear it, smell is all she has to go by, so..." A helpless shrug.

It's probably the most bizarre yet poetic description of a fart he's ever heard. Nera blinks at him expectantly, and small, yellowed teeth worry a bottom lip that looks marginally less dry than it did when she staggered up the gangplank.

"'S no problem," he grunts, and resists the inexplicable impulse to nod in vigorous affirmation. To Vaako, he says, "Wait at the bottom of the ramp. If you go any further-"

"I will suffer the direst of punishments," he says drily. "I am well aware. Come, bird, let's leave our benefactor to enjoy the flowers." He takes Nera's hand and leads her past him and through the door.

_He won't be such a smartass for much longer,_ Kirill sniffs, and slings the drawstring bag over his shoulder.

_And that innocent child won't be around to bring you more flowers,_ his grandmother adds with a dryness to rival the Gobi.

Beset on all sides, he performs a final sweep of the cabin for any weapons, ammunition, or useful miscellanea he might have missed, and finding none, makes a final trip aft to collect his duffel from beneath the bed. This rattletrap piece of shit has been his home for months, but he can muster no fondness for it, and so he leaves it without a backward glance and makes a mental note to figure out how to slave its nav system to his new ride.

After all, every credit counts.

It's asshole dark by the time he joins his bounties outside, and Nera and Vaako are nothing but the vaguest of silhouettes, a firefly glint of cold starlight on silver and the muted clank of armor. 

_Three guns that I can't use and no goddamn flashlight,_ he fumes as he picks and gropes his way down the gangplank like a drunk, and he swears as he pitches to the left and sinks his foot into lumpy canvas that yields beneath his weight like rotting flesh. 

_Lucky I didn't step on that fucking helmet. I would've broken my goddamn ankle._

"Can you see?" he barks before he can think better of it. _Great. Just fucking tell them you're compromised. Desk life has made you soft and stupid._

"Well enough."

"Take this." He jabs the drawstring bag at the man-shaped shadow in front of him.

The darkness twists like living oil, and strong, cool fingers graze his knuckles. "What is it?"

"None of your concern. Just get moving."

The rattle of armor as the bulk that is Vaako faces forward again. A sudden dip, and for one bewildered instant, Kirill thinks he's dissolved, a golem gone back to the mud from whence it was formed, but then he rises again with a smaller lump jutting from what he guesses is his shoulder, and he realizes that he's simply picked up his sister.

"So tired," he murmurs. "Just a moment now, and you can go to sleep in your own bed." To Kirill, he calls over his shoulder. "Place your hand on my shoulder if you need a guide."

He very much does, as a matter of fact, but his pride won't let him admit it, so he merely growls like an ill-tempered sled dog and stoops to retrieve his trampled duffel. It's heavier for the helmet inside, and he curses his decision to keep it.

_Better in there than out there in the dark, waiting to trip you and let him put his boot in your neck until your windpipe collapses. At least in there, you can use it to bludgeon him if he and his courage are suddenly reunited._

But Vaako shows no interest in a last-ditch sprint for freedom or a desperate last stand in the godless dark. He moves with a fluid surety that Kirill finds unsettling, a panther padding lightly over the rocks and shale of a desert arroyo, and he keeps up a steady patter for which Kirill is reluctantly grateful, as it means he won't smash face-first into his back as he blunders in his wake.

"Such beautiful stars tonight," he croons, and melancholy envelops the words like spidersilk. The dry grass crunches underfoot.

_Who gives a shit about the stars?_ Kirill snarls. _They're all the same. Just points of dead light._

_You might not think so if you knew it was the last time you'd see them,_ his grandmother points out prosaically.

_Maybe the floor my father saw before they blew out his brains looked like the ceiling of this Sistine Chapel,_ he retorts savagely, and in his mind's eye, he sees his father kneeling on the concrete floor of some anonymous room with no windows and a drain in the floor, face pale and pinched and eyes blackened from a fight that he'd ultimately lost and carefully blank as he'd listened to the footsteps behind him and the dry, imperious release of the safety in the milliseconds before a small-caliber bullet sent his soul to God and his brains toward that tidy hole that would swallow everything without a trace.

"You're made from the stars, you know," Vaako is saying, no doubt to the sister cradled against his chest, and God, why won't he just shut the fuck up?

_Far be it from the man you will deliver to torture and murder for money to cry out to his God in farewell,_ Grandmother Orlova says. _We wouldn't want you to be uncomfortable while you stain your hands with the blood of the innocent._

"But you are so much brighter, my little bird, so much fiercer."

"Less talking, more walking," Kirill says uncharitably.

Vaako stops talking, but only to begin humming softly under his breath. Kirill's tempted to tell him to stop that, too, if only to prove his dominance, but the sorry truth is that he needs the sound to orient himself in the unobliging darkness.

The heavy _t-thunk_ of Vaako's boots on the gangplank announces the end of their blind trek, and he watches as his dark outline ascends, a phantom rising from the earth and drifting through the door.

_Now,_ he thinks as he hurries after him. _Now is when he slams the door in my face and retracts the gangplank and I'm left on this dead rock with a broken ass and a long, agonizing crawl back to my shuttle. Even I even find the fucking thing before the cold sets in and I freeze to death._

He waits for the rush of air over the tip of his nose that signifies the slamming of the door, but it never comes. Vaako merely ducks inside.

_He's not bullshitting, then. He's really given up._ The thought doesn't bring the customary sense of cold triumph, satisfaction of a job well done and soon to be duly rewarded. Instead he thinks of a horse too tired and broken to throw its rider, and of William, slumped and trussed in the back of a van, a sock in his mouth and a bag over his head and a heavy sedative coursing through his veins.

_The story's the same. Only in this one, you're the bogeyman._

"Are you sure your shuttle works?" He slips his go bag from his shoulder and lets it fall to the floor beside his feet.

"I am." Vaako, too, sets his burden down, albeit far more gently, and she stands beside him, shadowed face uptilted to peer at the familiar stranger in their midst. Teddy bear legs hang from beneath her cradling arm, and Kirill has no doubt it's studying him with idiot merriment.

_Hello, friend! Isn't this fun? We're having a slumber party._ He thinks of Tati and her excitement at having such a super-cool uncle, and the burning cramping of his belly threatens to double him over.

Vaako strokes her hair, and then he turns and steps toward the cockpit.

"Where the fuck do you think you're going?" Kirill demands.

"To power up the ship," Vaako answers mildly.

"Stay where you are. I'll do it."

"You cannot."

"Excuse me?"

"You are not Necromonger. It will not accept your offering."

Kirill has no idea what he means by offering, but if the shuttle is coded to Necro biology, that certainly puts a crimp in his plans to sell it once it's served its purpose.

"You thought we would not have such protocols?" Amused and tinged with sardonic incredulity. "You underestimate your adversary."

"Apparently not. I caught you, didn't I?" A dour silence greets this sally, and Kirill gleefully awards himself the point.

_Score one for me,_ he thinks with smug triumph.

"We wouldn't want reluctant converts getting control of our ships. The consequences would be...unfortunate," Vaako says at last.

_Reluctant converts._ The phrase makes his skin prickle, the cool skitter of insectile legs against overheated flesh.

_I don't want to know. I don't._

"Get it moving."

"Do the standard warnings apply?"

Oh, yes, the good commander is far too comfortable with this situation, Kirill thinks savagely, and it's time he was reminded of his place. He lunges, fist drawn back to deliver a punch, but a flutter of movement on the periphery of his vision freezes him, fist cocked and teeth bared.

It's Nera, still at her brother's side. She sidles from foot to foot with the rustle of dingy fabric, and a whimper rises in her throat, the plaintive yip of a kicked puppy.

_Party's over,_ Kirill thinks grimly, and another cramp sinks its diseased, serrated teeth into his belly. Guilt sours his mouth, and he breathes through his nose to quell the sudden, greasy nausea.

_Monster monster monster,_ his mind howls. _I'm the goddamn bogeyman._

He lowers his arm and relaxes his fingers and steps back.

"I'll take that as a yes," Vaako says, unfazed. The same cannot be said for Nera, who utters another piteous whine and seeks refuge behind her brother's leg, one fleshless arm wrapped around his knee and the other squeezing her bear so tightly that its legs rise in a spasmodic twitch.

_Still sure I'm a new friend, little bear?_ Bleak and bitter, and he longs for a bottle of vodka and a quiet corner free of frightened, bewildered eyes.

"Tell her I'm sorry."

Vaako's hands rise like raven's wings, but he does not speak. They flutter in the shadows for but a second and drop again.

"That's it?"

"Her language has little interest in superfluities. And I'm not sure she can see it in the dark."

"Then get off your ass and fix it."

An inclination of the head. "As you wish." He resumes his aborted approach to the console.

It's a matter of thirty seconds for his former lordship to power up the shuttle, but it's long enough for Kirill to learn what he means by sacrifice, and while he's seen his share of grievous wounds--and inflicted enough of them to damn himself a hundred times over, he's still repulsed by the slow ooze of Vaako's blood down the ignition switch and into a tiny reservoir at its base. It's not the blood that appalls him, but the dispassionate blankness of the man's face as he presses the pad of his thumb into the blade with an erotic languor. There's no flicker of pain as the blade sinks into his flesh, no reflexive tightening of the lips or blink of the eye, no nigh-imperceptible hesitation before the sacrificial flesh presses home, just an unflinching implacable, descent, and Kirill wonders, as the lights blink to sudden life and the engine begins to purr with a low, subterranean hum, just how many times he has offered himself up.

Nera hovers between them, tip of her thumb worried by her perpetually-moving teeth, and Kirill smothers the urge to swat her hand away. She's wan and wasted in the harsh, artificial light, hair long and straggling and brittle atop her scalp, and her eyes are sunken and bruised with exhaustion. And as he suspected, they're wide and wary as she gazes up at him. The bear, too, surveys him with newfound apprehension, its glass eyes wide and dismayed.

"Tell her I'm sorry," he says again. It shouldn't matter. What does he care what some ragamuffin child he'll never see again and who will soon be so much rotting flesh in a week thinks, but he can't stand to see her blinking up at him with such wounded, burgeoning fear.

Vaako finishes toggling various switches on the console. "The shuttle is ready for course coordinates."

Kirill eyes the console, a gleaming slab of obsidian from which toggles and switches sprout like warts. "Will that require a sacrifice, too?"

A mirthless twist of lip. "No."

"Tell her," he insists, and jabs a finger at Nera, and Christ he sounds like a hectoring babushka at the fish market.

Vaako dutifully assumes his role as translator, and Kirill can't help but admire the focus on his face as he watches her spindly fingers flutter in response.

"She wants to know why you did that," Vaako announces, and as if to buttress the point, Nera fixes him with a cool, expectant gaze, a teacher awaiting a reasonable and convincing explanation for the misconduct of an obstreperous pupil. And damned if he doesn't want to squirm beneath her dignified scrutiny.

He can't tell a child that he was planning to pummel her beloved brother into submission to his murderous scheme to return them to their merciless master for money, and so he scrolls through his dusty and moldering mental Rolodex for a plausible excuse. "I'm tired," he offers feebly, as if that pardons his intent to render her brother a bloody, compliant heap.

She surveys him through half-lidded eyes, no doubt assessing the profound depths of his obvious and terminal idiocy, and then she heaves the world-weary sigh of the long-suffering and takes him by the hand. He's so surprised that he doesn't even think to resist, and she leads him through the main cabin to the aft compartment, which he discovers, houses two beds, a spacious double in the middle and a bachelor's single against the rear wall. More overhead bins line the bulkheads like sinkholes, and there's a head at the head of the single bed. It's twice as big as the one in his now-abandoned vessel.

_Bastard knew how to pick them. I think the sink even has a counter._

Nera shepherds him to the smaller bed and bids him sit with a maternal pat to its edge. _Here,_ she seems to say. _This is for sleeping, you poor fool._

It's so absurd that he's tempted to laugh, but he doesn't dare, lest it be interpreted as mockery and invite tears from her or a punch to the back of the head from her indignant brother.

"Yes. Thank you," he says stiffly. "I have other things to do first."

When he makes no move to accept her invitation, her brows furrow and her hands rise.

"I don't-"

"If you want sleep, you should go to bed, not hit people." Vaako's voice sounds from behind him, and he's alarmed at how close he managed to get without being heard. "Hitting is what bad people do, and it isn't nice. But bed is." In front of him, Nera brightens, and her small fingers fly as she warms to her subject. "Bed is soft and warm, and you can have lots of blankets, and blankets _are_ nice."

_What is my life?_ he wonders, dazed, as he watches Nera's animated face and her brother's voice rumbles over his shoulder in faithful narration, even adopting her enthusiastic inflections.

_This is what you will destroy?_ his grandmother says as Nera bounces giddily on her toes, enthralled by the the untold joys of blanket.

_Not for money. For William._ His gut churns and aches, and he wishes he'd never taken the job, that he'd simply passed on the contract and let someone else have this blood on their hands and these lives on their conscience.

Ever the diligent instructor, Nera decides a demonstration would better penetrate his thick skull, and she makes a beeline for the bigger bed, which she leaps upon with surprising agility. She looses an exuberant hoot and bundles herself beneath the blankets.

"Yes. Thank you," Kirill says, bewildered and flat-footed. Facing a Delta Force squadron in the belly of an active volcano would be less daunting than the unremitting sunniness of this trapped, dying child. "I'll keep that in mind, but I have things to do first." _Like set the course that will kill you._

"And you have things to do before we go to bed," Vaako reminds her, the motions of his hands suddenly stern.

The lump on the bed grunts irritably at him.

"Yes. You have to wash your face and brush your teeth. You'll be sorry if they all fall out."

Another sullen grunt, but she throws back the blankets and slithers off the bed.

"Good girl." Vaako rests a guiding hand on her shoulder and gently chivvies her toward the head. He doesn't speak again until they're in the doorway, and when he does, it's to him. "We have a shower with actual water. It draws moisture from the atmosphere. You're welcome to use it."

Kirill stares at him in mute consternation. How can he be so nonchalantly civil, as though he were an unexpected guest and not the man sent to hunt them down and trade their lives for money? His jaw twitches, and his head throbs, and his gut churns and churns.

"Your hospitality will not buy your lives. Nothing can." He means it to be a pronouncement of cold certainty, but the words are thin and hollow in his ears, and they burn his throat like lye.

The man in the doorway merely blinks at him, slow and imperious as as sated jungle cat. _You hold no terrors for me, mortal._ "If I am to die, then I choose to die as I am and not as the monster they have made of me," he says simply.

And what can he say to that? The air turns to treacle, and his reconstructed leg throbs in wordless accusation. He manages a brusque nod and flees to the safety of the cockpit with its mindless array of switches and toggles and a clear path to what must be done. The door to the head glides closed behind him, and from behind it comes the soft trill of a caged bird.

It's quiet in the cockpit, but he cannot escape the ghosts in his head, and they whisper incessantly as he stares dully at the nav panel and the blank spaces awaiting the input of coordinates.

Mike, worn and imploring and voice thick with grief. _Find him, Kirill. You've got to go get him._

Tatiana, seven years old and furious, hands balled into fists with which to batter down the world and snot glistening on her upper lip. _I want my Daddy!_

Grandmother Orlova, mournful and disapproving. _Demon boy._

The Lord Marshall, pale and vulpine on his throne. _They must know the price of disobedience._

William, sitting beside him on that hospital bed in that shitty CIA hospital and carding his fingers through the stubby bristles of his hair, hand on his nape and voice a low, soothing murmur in his ear. _It's all right, Kiryusha. I've got you._

Vaako, standing in the doorway and looking at him with William's eyes. _If I am to die, then I choose to die as I am and not as the monster they have made of me._

Nera, gazing up at him with guileless curiosity and a flicker of hope, as though he were a new friend come to brighten her days and not a bogeyman sent to end them.

They crowd his head until it feels hot and swollen, until he's sure his skull must shatter from the pressure, and all the while, the nav screen waits, its spaces patiently blank.


End file.
